“What’re you doing?”
“Was it Elle?” she asked, voice shuddering as she fought back tears. “Did Elle tell them all those things about me?”
“None of that shit was even true, Katie,” I said in my best soothing voice. I was shit at soothing women, case in point, my sister, who I had no fucking clue how to get through to. I just started pulling things back out of the suitcase.
“No, it wasn’t true, was it?” she said, taking her clothes from my hands and stuffing them back in. “Except for one thing. You know, that thing about our relationship being fake. Oh, and that other thing about you hiring me.” She pulled off the flip flops she was wearing and crammed them into the suitcase too. “Someone must have told them about that.”
Damn. The article said all that? Maybe I should’ve actually read it.
Katie started tossing pillows and looking behind furniture.
“It wasn’t Elle,” I said.
“She knows about us. Someone must’ve told her. She said our relationship was fake.”
I watched her search beneath the table we ate our breakfast on. “Katie—”
“It is fake,” she said. “It is fucking fake and none of this is worth it. None of it is worth this.” She jabbed at the screen of her phone, then turned it to me, showing the photo of Zane’s hand on her ass.
“Did something happen last night? With Zane? Did you talk to Elle? What am I missing here?”
She got down on her hands and knees and started crawling around, looking under the beds.
“If someone told her about us, I don’t know who it was… What the fuck are you doing?”
“Where the hell is my sketchbook?” she cried, digging under the sheets.
“It’s over here.” I plucked it from the desk where she’d left it and handed it to her. I had no fucking idea why I did that, since the next thing she did was pack it, and that was the last thing I wanted her to do. But I couldn’t handle seeing her lose her shit.
She went into the bathroom and started grabbing up all her cherry-vanilla-cream smelling lotions and whatever and I just about lost it.
“Katie. Calm the fuck down.” I followed her back to the bed where she smushed all her toiletries in with her clothes and jammed the suitcase shut. I’d never seen her so irrational. This was the girl who usually sealed all her little bottles of shampoo and whatever in separate Ziploc bags in case they leaked.
“Look,” I said, but she wouldn’t even look at me as she zipped up the suitcase. “Since I took off on your birthday to deal with Jessa and made you worry, everything’s been fucked up. Things haven’t been right between us.”
“Things were never right between us, Jesse.”
“I rattled your trust in me, and for that, I’m sorry.”
“It’s not that. It’s not you.” She looked at me with the saddest eyes I’d ever seen. “I’m truly sorry for whatever is going on with your sister, Jesse. She’s so lovely. And what the two of you have been through makes my heart hurt.” She rubbed her nose, still fighting back tears. I almost wished she’d just go ahead and cry; maybe then she’d sit down and stop trying to get the hell out of here. “It’s not that I don’t care. Really. The problem is I won’t have anything left to give, to deal with anything, if I go down this road. Did you know I haven’t been drawing all this week? I’m not even eating much.”
“I didn’t know—”
“I feel like I’m totally losing myself, Jesse. Just like I did when I was with Josh. I tried to be what he wanted and I ended up totally forgetting who I am.”
“That’s not what’s happening,” I said, though I had no idea if that was true. I’d been so consumed with worrying about Jessa the last while I hadn’t even noticed if Katie wasn’t eating or feeling right about things. “You’re just using this as an excuse to run away,” I said, though I didn’t know if that was true either.
“This is my family,” she said, finally turning to face me. “I would never use them for anything. These are children, being photographed by some creep with a telephoto lens while we didn’t even know they were there. This is the people I love being affected by what I’m doing.”
“That’s what happens when you’re in the spotlight, Katie. Sometimes it bleeds over onto people you care about. That’s the life.”
“Then it’s not a life for me.” She yanked her suitcase off the bed and put it on the floor at her feet. “I can’t hack it, Jesse. You said if I couldn’t hack it, you’d let me go.”
“That was before.”
“Before what?”
She stared up at me and I knew I had a chance, right now. She was giving me that chance. To say something meaningful. Before I got to know you. Before I started to care.
Before I figured out that I couldn’t stand to lose you.
I didn’t say any of those things. I didn’t say anything. I just stood there, the words all clogged up in my throat.
She swallowed and nodded, seeming to file my silence away as further evidence of my stone-cold heart. “I can’t be famous for fucking a rock star,” she said, calmly, “and all those other guys too.”
“You didn’t fuck any of them, and I know that.”
“But no one else does. This is out there. My family is out there. And who knows what it will be next.”
“This hurt you. I know. But we can talk about it.”
“I can’t,” she said, much quieter, and she wouldn’t even look me in the eye as she said it. “I can’t be your fake girlfriend anymore. It’s just… kind of killing me.”
“I don’t want you to be my fake girlfriend,” I managed to say, even quieter. I wasn’t even sure she heard me. I wasn’t even sure what I was saying, but I didn’t fucking want her to go.
“I just need to figure out what the fuck I’m doing with my life and I can’t do it like this.” She turned and put on the shoes that were sitting beside the door.
I didn’t even want to ask her what “like this” meant. My heart was freefalling into my guts.
“Katie, I don’t care what the fuck you’re doing. Just do it here.” She looked over at me. “I can take care of you,” I added lamely. I knew it was lame as soon as it was out of my mouth.
She shook her head. “I don’t want to be taken care of, Jesse. I want something of my own. I can’t just be the girl who’s famous for being photographed making out with the famous guy. Don’t you get that?”
“Then don’t be that.”
“Fine.” She gathered up her little pink sweater and her purse.
Shit. Not what I meant.
“I’ll make arrangements with Jude,” she said. “Flynn can take me to the airport. Jude or Maggie or someone can help me get a flight. You don’t need to worry about it. I’ll be okay.”
“Fuck that.” I grabbed her hand to stop her as she reached for her suitcase. “What do you want? You want to draw? You want to bake? Whatever it is…”
But she was shaking her head again. Her blue-green eyes settled on me, and I knew I’d lost her. “I just want someone who cares about me,” she said, so quietly.
My chest felt tight; it was getting harder to breathe by the second. Did she really not get it?
“I care about you.”
“No, Jesse,” she said. “You care about record sales.”
I let her hand fall from mine. And maybe it wasn’t fucking fair of me to be hurt by that, but those words cut me to the bone. “Is that what you think?”
“That was the deal, right? Six weeks to help your record sales and sell tickets? Well, the tour is sold out and you’ve said yourself that the album has outdone everyone’s expectations. Your six weeks are almost up anyway. I’ll pay you back what I owe you for the last week.” She picked up her suitcase and stood there, looking small and so fucking unsure. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “This isn’t your fault. I should never have agreed to this. I can’t just follow you around while you work and follow your dream—”
“Katie—”
“No. I
t’s not who I am. I’m not a groupie. I’m not your wife. I’m not even your girlfriend. This is just a job. And I quit.”
She headed for the door and I just stood there like an asshole. The asshole who’d gotten the bright idea to hire her in the first place. The asshole who’d promised her this was only a business deal.
And now a business deal was all I was ever going to get.
“Katie—”
“Look.” She turned on me, practically pleading. “I know I’ve been a coward before but please understand, I just can’t do this again.”
“Do what again?”
She sighed and her shoulders sagged, like everything was just too fucking heavy. “What I did with Josh. I didn’t know how to say goodbye. I didn’t know how to end it, even though it was over. And look at it. It’s still dragging around behind me wherever I go.” She stepped closer. “So I’m saying goodbye.”
She kissed me on the cheek. Then she looked at me, her big blue-greens bright with unshed tears.
“Goodbye, Jesse Mayes.”
CHAPTER 34
JESSE
“I can’t do it, man. I’ve gotta fly back and make this right.”
I was so fucking tired I was practically slurring. It was an ungodly early hour and I was standing in my hotel room in San Francisco in my underwear gripping my phone like a lifeline. It was seventeen hours since Katie walked out and I was falling apart. I’d barely eaten. I hadn’t even slept.
At the other end of the line I heard a very tired Brody sigh. “Not today, brother,” he said. “There’s not enough time.”
“I can fly up there and make it back for the show. There’s gotta be a way.”
“And then what? Even if we could make the flights work, what are you gonna do? Talk to her for an hour, turn around and fly back out to do another show? Risk getting held up at Customs and fucking over your fans? What’s the point of that?”
I paced the length of the hotel room feeling like a fucking caged lion, all the things I should’ve said to Katie while she was here broiling in my head.
“The point is I need to see her. Right fucking now.”
“We’ll take care of Katie on our end. Flynn got her back safe, and he won’t let her out of his sight. You do what you’ve gotta do out there, finish the tour, then you come home.”
I held a sharp breath.
“Flynn’s got this, brother. No worries.”
I sat on the bed and punched my thigh. Hard. I’d never been so pissed off at myself as I was for letting Katie get on that plane.
“You care about her, give her everything you’ve got. Not just a slice of time between your other commitments.”
“I don’t know, man.”
“It’s only three more shows,” Brody said. “Finish the tour. Then you can have all the time you need with her back home.”
“Fuck, Brody. It can’t be like this. Family first, remember?”
“I do remember.”
“So?” I said.
“You telling me she’s family?”
I didn’t answer that.
“If she is, then give her all you’ve got. That’s all I’m gonna say.”
“This is me giving my all. It’s taking everything I’ve got not to go after her right fucking now and leave you all without a fucking show tonight. Family fucking first. You know that, Brody. I told you that from the start. That if it ever came down to it, if Jessa needed me in the middle of the night, any fucking day of the week, if she called me and needed that, I was gone.”
Brody was silent for a long while. So long I checked my phone to make sure the call hadn’t dropped.
“Tell me,” he finally said. “How many times over the years has that happened, Jessa calling you up and asking you to drop everything to come help her out?”
Brody knew the answer to that. The answer was zero.
Jessa had never once asked for my help.
I sighed, hard. “Katie thinks Elle knows, about the deal. That she put it out there.”
“Elle didn’t leak shit. She’s not gonna say shit to anyone about you or Katie.”
“I know. I told Katie that.”
“Anyway, it was me.”
I pressed my fingers into my eyes. I heard it; I knew what I heard. Couldn’t fucking believe it. “You did what?”
“I talked to the media.”
“The fuck you did.”
“You want to sell music? You want to stay at the top? The fans love your music, brother, but they’re fucking insatiable for this love triangle shit. Last night that live version of New Girl you recorded in New York was hovering at the edge of the charts. Today it’s the most downloaded song on the planet. You can thank me when you’re in a better fucking mood.”
“Thank you for what? Making Katie look like a whore in the press? You think that’s what I want the world to think? The fans? Katie’s family? Did you think about how she was gonna feel to have that out there? That I fucking paid her to be my girlfriend?”
“No one’s saying that. And if they did, who would believe it?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Let’s see, man. Because no one’s going to believe that Jesse Mayes had to pay a woman to do anything. And because no one’s going to buy, for a split second, that that girl isn’t right where she wants to be.”
“Right. Because she’s sitting here right now, on my dick.”
Brody got quiet in a way I knew I wasn’t gonna like. “You’re such an asshole, man.”
“Fuck you, Brody. I don’t need this shit right now.”
“Anyone can see you’re in love with her.”
Christ.
I put my head in my hand and rubbed my eyes until I saw stars.
“Okay,” he said. “Anyone but you.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“You told me to be ruthless,” he reminded me. “Ruthless. You told me that. And yes, you told me family first. You also stood here in my living room three months ago and told me anything to make this album, this tour, a success. Any fucking thing, Jesse.”
“You should have come to me.”
“Did you say that to me or not?”
“I said it.”
“And you meant it.” It wasn’t even a question.
“Yeah. I fucking meant it. You know I fucking meant it. You still should’ve talked to me before you went to the media.”
“Maybe I would have if you hadn’t pulled a disappearing act at the time I needed to talk to you. And I didn’t go to them. They came to me. They asked about these rumors they got wind of that Katie was hired to work for you. They were hot to spin this whole love triangle thing and I said yes. That’s all. They think she was hired as your assistant. Big fucking deal. They invented the rest.”
“And now she’s gone.”
“She’s not gone, brother. She’s home. She’ll be here when you get back.”
“She better fucking be.”
“She will.”
“You’re an asshole yourself, you know?”
Brody was silent.
It was rare that Brody and I argued. I remembered how Katie had described her friend Devi as her in-case-of-emergency phone call. For me, that call was Brody. The friend who’d been my rock since day one, who’d kept the crazy at bay, kept me from capsizing as I weathered the wildest, most fucked-up storms of my life.
The only person who really knew, who really knew, what this album meant to me.
And why.
“You know,” he said, “Jude wouldn’t even tell me where you went the other night in L.A..”
Fuck me.
My heart fell about two feet. Brody knew. Or at the very least, he suspected that I met up with Jessa in L.A. and didn’t tell him.
“She asked me not to tell anyone, man.”
“Right,” he said. “Family first.”
“For fuck’s sake, Brody. You want me to choose between you and my sister?”
“Not asking you to choose, brother. Never asked you
to choose.”
Jesus. How did we get onto this? We never talked about this.
Ever.
“Right,” Brody said when I didn’t respond. “So maybe this is a good time to remind you why you’re doing this tour in the first place. This album was your idea. Remember who you’re doing it for.” Then he hung up.
I stared at the phone in my hand. It was the first time in fifteen years of friendship and business partnership that Brody had ever hung up on me.
And he was right, of course. Brody was rarely wrong.
I punched the bed, because it was a better idea than punching the fucking wall, which I really wanted to do.
Then I texted Katie.
Be home in 5 days. Can we talk?
It was barely five in the morning, so I didn’t expect a response. I was lucky Brody picked up, but then again, Brody would take my call any time of any night.
Fuck.
I couldn’t even be pissed off at the guy. Not when he was the only one who knew what was at stake here, and the only one who cared about it as much as I did. Which was why I’d called him. Because I also knew he was the only one who’d be able to talk me into finishing the tour.
Yeah. Just fuck.
I scrubbed my hand over my face. I knew I had to finish what I’d started, but I couldn’t wait to be done with this fucking tour. I was already done with pretending I didn’t feel for Katie what I felt.
Done pretending I didn’t want her like I did.
I stared at the phone in my hand. She hadn’t responded to my text.
I texted her again anyway, hoping like hell it wasn’t far too little, far too late.
Miss you like hell.
It was true. I did miss her.
More than that.
I never wanted to be apart from her again.
CHAPTER 35
KATIE
I’d been back in Vancouver for almost thirty-six hours. I’d barely slept and had eaten little more than iced cherry-vanilla lattes with copious amounts of cherries—which, according to my sister, did not count as food.
Devi had met me at Nudge, where soon enough I’d be in rotation again to keep the cash rolling in. I kept telling her I was giving Jesse his money back, and she kept telling me not to be an idiot, that I’d earned every penny. I wasn’t so sure. But we’d kind of given up on arguing about it. Somewhere around the hundredth time I asked her what I should do and she told me, for the hundredth time, “Talk to him,” we called it a stalemate. For now.